Junior Bridgeman, who followed a strong N.B.A. career with a remarkable run as an entrepreneur, acquiring hundreds of fast-food restaurants, a Coca-Cola bottling business and a minority stake in the Milwaukee Bucks, his team for a decade, died on Tuesday in Louisville, Ky. He was 71.
The cause was a cardiac event, a family spokesman said. Mr. Bridgeman had been talking to a reporter for a local television station during a charity event at the Galt House Hotel when he said he felt that he was having a heart attack, the spokesman said, and he was taken to a hospital, where he died.
Mr. Bridgeman’s business success brought him a net worth of $1.4 billion this year, Forbes magazine said, putting him in “rare air alongside Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James as the only N.B.A. players with 10-figure fortunes.”
Mr. Johnson, writing on X after the death, recalled that Mr. Bridgeman, a former small forward, had “one of the sweetest jump shots in the N.B.A.” Mr. Bridgeman, he added, had helped create a blueprint for “so many current and former athletes across sports that success doesn’t end when you’re done playing.”
Mr. Bridgeman was not a major star during his 12 seasons in the N.B.A., 10 with the Bucks and two with the Los Angeles Clippers. But he stood out as a sixth man who provided a scoring boost off the bench for a Milwaukee team that largely excelled under Coach Don Nelson. From 1975 to 1987, Mr. Bridgeman averaged 13.6 points a game.
“Junior gives us so much coming off the bench that I hesitate to start him,” Mr. Nelson told The Los Angeles Times in 1979. “A player that can come in and pick up a team like he can is important. Who starts doesn’t matter that much, because Junior will still get his minutes.”
Mr. Bridgeman’s first major taste of business success came in 1978, when he invested $150,000 in a new cable television business run by Jim Fitzgerald, the Bucks’ majority owner. A few years later, Mr. Fitzgerald handed him a $700,000 check.
Around that time, Mr. Bridgeman became fascinated that Wayne Embry, the Bucks’ general manager and himself a former N.B.A. player, owned McDonald’s franchises in Milwaukee. Mr. Bridgeman came to believe that ownership would appeal to him more than working for others when he retired.
In 1984, he invested in a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in Chicago. Three years later, he and another former N.B.A. player, Paul Silas, went into business together in another Wendy’s outlet, in Brooklyn, but it proved to be a money loser. After retiring from the Bucks, Mr. Bridgeman attended a Wendy’s training school to learn everything he could about running a franchise.
In 1988, he invested an estimated $750,000 to buy five Wendy’s restaurants in Milwaukee.
“He’d be working in the restaurant like he was an hourly worker,” Sidney Moncrief, a former Bucks teammate, told ESPN in 2024. “I was thinking, ‘What the heck is he doing in there flipping burgers, washing dishes?’ And he had those work pants on.”
From that start, Mr. Bridgeman built an empire of some 450 fast-food restaurants around the United States. In 2016, he announced that he was selling a chunk of them (120 Chili’s and 100 Wendy’s) to a private buyer, and that he had agreed to buy territories from the Coca-Cola Company in Kansas, Missouri and Illinois and to start a bottling company to produce and distribute the company’s beverage brands.
In 2018, he added to his beverage holdings by investing in a joint venture that acquired Coca-Cola’s Canadian bottling and distribution business. His partner, Larry Tanenbaum, is the chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns several professional teams, including the Toronto Raptors and Maple Leafs, and is also chairman of the N.B.A. board of governors.
“We were introduced through mutual friends in the N.B.A.,” Ken Tanenbaum, the executive chairman of Coca-Cola Bottling Canada and Larry’s son, wrote in an email. “My dad and I cherished him as a partner and a friend.” Mr. Bridgeman was a minority partner, but, Mr. Tanenbaum said, “We always operated it as a true partnership.”
Ulysses Lee Bridgeman Jr. was born on Sept. 17, 1953, in East Chicago, Ind., to Ulysses Lee Bridgeman Sr., who worked in a steel mill, and Delores (Meaders) Bridgeman.
He helped lead the University of Louisville Cardinals to the Final Four of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament in 1975, where they lost, 75-74, to the eventual champion, U.C.L.A. His 36 points against Rutgers in a Midwest regional quarterfinal game in 1975 is still a Louisville N.C.A.A. tournament record. That same year, he averaged 16.2 points and 7.4 rebounds a game. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1975.
In the 1975 N.B.A. draft, he was selected eighth overall by the Los Angeles Lakers. But less than a month later, he was sent to the Bucks in the blockbuster trade that brought the future Hall of Fame center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Lakers.
Mr. Bridgeman played for the Bucks alongside, among others, Sidney Moncrief, Marques Johnson and Bob Lanier. The Bucks won six division titles with Mr. Bridgeman in Milwaukee — and 60 games in the 1980-81 season — but never got past a conference finals.
After nine seasons with the Bucks, Mr. Bridgeman was traded to the Clippers in 1984. He returned to the Bucks for the 1986-87 season.
He contemplated continuing in basketball, he told The New York Times in 2004. but “there was a part of me that wanted to go out and see what else I could do.”
And, he said, the food business interested him.
“I felt that one thing people were always going to do was eat,” he said. “So, since I was looking to invest in something, I figured food would be the safest investment.”
To his portfolio of restaurants and bottling, he added Ebony and Jet magazines, which he bought out of bankruptcy court for $14 million in 2020. Both magazines had moved to digital-only platforms after they stopped print publication.
“When you look at Ebony, you look at the history not just for Black people, but of the United States,” Mr. Bridgeman told The Chicago Tribune at the time of the purchase. “I think it’s something that a generation is missing, and we want to bring that back as much as we can.”
Mr. Bridgeman is survived by his wife, Doris (Payne) Bridgeman; his daughter, Eden Bridgeman Sklenar, who is the chief executive of Ebony and Jet; his sons, Ryan, the president of Manna, which owns the family’s remaining 240 Wendy’s outlets, Fazoli’s and Golden Corral restaurants, and Justin, the executive director of Heartland Coca-Cola, a bottling business; his sister, April Bridgeman; his brothers, Darryl and Samuel; and six grandchildren.
Last September, Mr. Bridgeman returned to his basketball roots in Milwaukee when he acquired a 10 percent stake in the Bucks.
“When this opportunity presented itself,” he said at a news conference, “it just seemed like the natural thing for me to get a chance to be part — not just in the heart, but physically — of the organization going forward.”
